Bumblebee Paddles

Part of the reason I started paddling – well, part of the reason I started looking into qualifications in paddling – was so that I could go to Studland in the summer, hire a kayak and feel confident that I knew what I was doing. I’ve done that a few times and they don’t generally get their own blog post. I enjoy those trips but there’s nothing worth writing home about. But this time, I’m going to, because I had a really good day at the beach.

First, I hired a kayak. It’s a sit-on-top, which isn’t my favourite kind these days (do I remember when the idea of putting on a spraydeck petrified me? Still less than three years ago!) but it’s what Studland Water Sports do. There are two companies down at Studland. I do my sea kayaking adventures with Fore/Adventure and I love them but I don’t hire from them – they want photo ID and they only let you go out a couple of hundred metres. Walk down to Knowle Beach and Studland Water Sports will give you a kayak and let you go wherever you want, for the price of a big yellow plastic tag which you attach to your buoyancy aid with their phone number on it so you can call them if you get into trouble. They’re quite happy for you to do the 5km round trip to Old Harry Rocks and frankly, that never gets old. They also took my answer to “Have you done much kayaking before”, “A reasonable amount, I’ve done my Paddlesport Safety & Rescue” as “ok, no more questions needed” which was quite gratifying, and the first time I’ve had the opportunity to say it.

It was a hot and bright day but a breezy one. I admit, I didn’t realise that until I was handrailing south along the beaches to the cliffs at the bottom of the bay and finding I had to do a reasonable amount of paddling on one side only to keep in a straightish line. It’s not the worst I’ve ever paddled in. Studland Bay is very shallow and very sheltered but it does get some fun little waves at time and you find yourself bump-bump-bumping over them. That didn’t happen. Perhaps the sea was a bit up-and-down but it didn’t have breaking waves to crash over, even small ones. So I carried on to Old Harry. When you get around the cliffs at the bottom, it’s more sheltered and if you stick close enough to the cliffs, it becomes a veritable millpond.

So I reached Old Harry. The beach around the famous formation varies hugely depending on the tide. Sometimes you can paddle straight through St Lucas’s Leap, the gap between the land and the stack, carried by wild water forced through the bottleneck. Sometimes you can land on the stones. And sometimes the stones are a big wide beach, like they were today. I crashed onto the rocks, got out and pulled my boat up a bit further. Nothing quite as embarrassing as having to phone the hire company to explain that you let the sea steal your kayak and now you’re stranded on a rock. I took a few photos, I met some people who’d paddleboarded out, I took their photos, they took mine and then, five or so minutes after landing, I was turning the kayak around, getting it off the rocks and jumping back onto it.

This was where I really realised how strong the wind was because it turned out to paddle back along the cliffs to the beaches, I was paddling straight into the wind. Luckily, I enjoy this – it’s hard work but it’s satisfying work. I think it’s because you need even pressure on both sides. It’s paddling one-sided that really frustrates me. Pitting my strength against the wind is merely fun. I got halfway along the cliffs and stopped to take some selfies with the Girlguiding Adventure Leader badge and then I looked at my watch. Oh no. I had less than twenty minutes until my hire time ran out and I was still on the opposite side of the bay. How had that happened?!

In hindsight, I suspect I usually hire for an hour and a half. I always go out to Old Harry – whether I land or not depends on circumstances but I always go there. Then I have time to kill just off Knowle Beach. So I assumed I had plenty of time and I did not. I’d only hired for an hour, thinking that was how long I usually had but it can’t be. It must be an hour or half or even two hours if I can get all the way to Old Harry and still have time to waste. Definitely something to remember in future.

Normally when I go out with Fore/Adventure, we handrail from Middle Beach – follow the beach and the cliff around, sticking to the relatively shallow and calm bits instead of ploughing across the bay. Well, I had less than twenty minutes. Today I would have to plough. And today I learned why we don’t do that. It’s not the depth, which doesn’t particularly bother me. It’s not the yachts moored there, which you have to dodge, or the jetskis flying around – not as many as I make it sound like. No, it’s just that it’s pretty open to the breeze. Paddling into the wind along the cliffs is fun exercise. Paddling into the wind all the way across the bay, with a deadline, without time to stop and rest or get your breath back, paddling like your life depends on it, is… well, it’s very hard work. I might have enjoyed it without the time pressure because while it was hard, it wasn’t impossible, not by a long way. It’s just extra-hard when you can’t ever let up. I was six minutes late back and… they didn’t even notice.

I thought my arms and shoulders might protest for a few days after such a wild paddle but I had an ace up my sleeve. I’d come down to Studland in the first place because Studland Water Sports have a couple of saunas. They opened the first one a couple of years ago but getting into it was difficult. Booking it out was expensive and it got booked up quickly, and turning up for the public sessions was more complicated than it sounds. But now they have two huts, a 10-seater and the original 6-seater and you can book a timeslot for either an hour or half an hour. I’d booked the small one, just for me, for half an hour. I had an hour after my paddle to get out of the wetsuit and have a snack in the beach cafe and then turn up and do all the prelim stuff for going in the sauna, which turned out to be “Hi, I’m here for a sauna”, “Oh, what’s your name? Ok, we’ve got someone in there at the moment, if you can wait ten minutes for it to be cleaned, we’ll call you”. So I sat and watched a school group messing around with the pedalos and then it was sauna time.

It kind of is just a wooden shed with a wood burner inside. Something about the sauna experience was missing. Was it that the hut is clean and dry? Was it that I was on my own? Was is that it has fairly big windows which let in the sunshine? Why didn’t it feel quite like any sauna I’ve ever been in before?

The reason it’s so clean is that they ask you to bring an extra towel to sit on and you have to wash the sand off your feet in a big dish of water before you go in. It doesn’t get full of sand and grit and filth, the benches don’t get wet, it all looks pristine. You get views over Studland Bay and Old Harry and when the heat gets too much for you, you push open the door, hop over the dish and scurry down the sand to the sea for the cold portion of the ritual. I’m not big on excessive heat, so I did four hot-cold cycles. Sit here for another minute and a half and then you can cool off in the sea. I went to Löyly, the big public sauna in Helsinki about this time last year and their cold water is the Baltic. I went down the ladder-steps into the open sea as far as my ankles before fleeing to the warmth of the saunas again and it took the best part of an hour for my feet to thaw out. In Studland, I can at least get out to mid-calf length and splash water all over myself and get cooled down before I have to run back in.

For someone who finds that kind of heat uncomfortable and spent the entire sessions promising myself I could go in the sea and cool off in just another minute, it all seemed to be over very quickly. I guess five minutes of searing heat alternating four times with a dip in the sea will add up to thirty minutes very quickly. I wouldn’t have wanted a whole hour but a sauna on the beach for half an hour is, it turns out, the perfect way to soothe muscles that did too much kayaking too quickly.

In an ideal world, I probably would have stayed on the beach for a while and worked myself up to an actual swim and then finished off the day with one of the Bankes Arms’ massive cheese baguettes but I had plans in Bournemouth for the evening. On the other hand, that gave me an excuse to go on the chain ferry, which I very rarely get to do. It only takes about a minute to haul itself across the mouth of Poole Harbour and it’s the weirdest minute or so because although you can feel the rumbling of the ship, you can’t really see or feel that you’re moving until it starts to pull up the ramp on the other side.

So that was my day at the beach – hard kayak, seaside sauna and bonus chain ferry. In next week’s blog, I think I’m taking you back down to Studland two whole years ago for my first ever capsize on the sea.